ODF Olympiad 2008 winners from India and Malaysia were announced at the Worldwide Developer Conference, Sun Tech Days hosted by Sun Microsystems at Hyderabad. The four winners were awarded a laptop each, sponsored by IOTA (society under Government of West Bengal). The laptops had Ubuntu installed.

The DARPA’s Urban Challenge is an engineering competition to develop an autonomous vehicle capable of navigating urban streets safely while obeying traffic regulations and covering the 60 mile course in 6 hours or less. The goal is to develop vehicles that can one day self navigate through dangerous urban environments.

The winning team, Carnegie Mellon University’s Tartan Racing, took home the $2 million first prize. Their Chevy Tahoe, named Boss, used 12 Intel Core Duo CPUs to run the C++ application software comprising 200,000 lines of code and used Ubuntu 6.06 LTS as their operating system foundation. The team developed their system using the open source development stack of GCC, Valgrind and the Boost framework and were aided by McCabe IQ, a commercial software quality management suite which was ported to Ubuntu by McCabe.

The Canary Islands have two derivatives of Kubuntu, one which is being installed in all their schools and one used by the largest university. The Jornadas de Software Libre conference at The University of La Laguna, took place in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, from the 18th-21st September 2007. It was organised by the university’s Software Libre Office (OSL).

In a trip to on the of the schools, mEDUXa 1.2 was shown to Jonathan Riddell (Kubuntu’s main developer) and Aaron Seigo (president of KDE e.V.). For more than an hour, members of the MEDUSA project from the Educational Department of the Canary Island Regional Government, along with some of the members of mEDUXa’s 1.2 team and conference organisers, all talked about the project. These well known community members were informed about the actual state of the project and future plans. They visited a computer lab where the workstations were all running Kubuntu based mEDUXa v1.2.

300 schools already have mEDUXa v1.2. The MEDUSA project (which has mEDUXa as its major free software effort) is developing mEDUXa v2, based on Kubuntu Feisty Fawn with KDE 3.5.6. It is going to be deployed in 100 more schools before the end of the year. That means that about 8000 computers will have mEDUXa on them by January. During 2008 and the first half of 2009, every single state school (about 1100) will have mEDUXa on their desktops. There are also plans for distributing a mEDUXa LiveCD.

During the conference, Aaron Seigo talked about the exciting new capabilities coming in KDE4. Jonathan Riddell described the expanding Ubuntu eco-system as well as the many different distributions based on Kubuntu including Linux MCE, mEDUXa and many others. Jonathan talked about Kubuntu Gutsy and described the Launchpad Free Software project hosting platform. Another talk was about the Canary Island regional government’s plans for free software in education (including mEDUXa v2, courses for teachers, mEDUXa’s liveCD, free software applications that will be included in windows by default in schools, etc.).

Several morning long workshops were held during the 4 day conference. In one of them Kubuntu packaging was described and there was a tutorial on using bzr and Launchpad. Aaron Seigo gave an introduction to KDE and Qt programming. Bardinux v2, La Laguna’s college distribution for students, based on Feisty Fawn, has had a big impact amongst students from that college. New tools for developing derivative distributions, the Unidistro project, were also announced to the Free Software community. Unidistro is a combined effort from various Spanish colleges, the main objective being to simplify the development and distribution of Ubuntu based Live CDs.

The French Parliament looks to be the next big organisation to switch to one of the Ubuntu family, in this case Kubuntu. Recently the Parliament produced an official government report that recommended the use of free software over proprietary software. The switch to free software is expected to provide a substantial savings to the tax-payers according to the government study.

Following this recommendation two companies, Linagora and Unilog, have been selected to provide the members of the Parliament as well as their assistants new computers containing free software. This will amount to 1,154 new computers running Kubuntu prior to the start of the next session which occurs in June 2007.

More detailed information can be read in French at ZDNet.fr and latribune.fr. There is also an article available in English from November 2006 pertaining to this same exact report at ZDNet.com.

If you’re using Ubuntu in any kind of organisation, we’d love to hear from you.

The more detail you give us the better, but even if its just a paragraph that would be great. Photos are very welcome AND please state clearly if you are happy for us to share your story!

Over the next couple of months we would like to start sharing these stories and let others hear how Ubuntu works in our lives, schools and businesses.

So don’t wait, visit www.ubuntu.com/mystory or email us now at mystory@ubuntu.com.

NewsForge reports a wonderful success story for an Iowa art professor who migrated his students from Mac OS X to Ubuntu for their digital arts course. Way to go!

I’m an art professor, and last semester I embarked on an exciting new adventure by erasing Mac OS X from nearly all of the Macintoshes in our digital media lab and installing Ubuntu in its place.

I began seriously planning this change last school year, when I realized how fully the current feature sets of free software programs could satisfy the technical needs of the students in my classes. I decided that the time had come to teach our undergraduate art students about free software programs such as the GIMP, Scribus, and Quanta Plus, instead of proprietary programs such as Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and Dreamweaver.

The switch to free software has been a big success here in the Department of Art and Design at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. This semester I plan to take the switch further in my video classes by replacing Avid DV Express, Final Cut Express HD, Soundtrack, and iDVD with Kino, Cinelerra, Rosegarden, and DVDstyler.

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Great news for lovers of Ubuntu and MEPIS:

MEPIS founder Warren Woodford has announced a test release of SimplyMEPIS 6.0, incorporating software from the Ubuntu Dapper package pools. This is the first version of SimplyMEPIS with an Ubuntu base.

Ubuntu has a 6 month stable release cycle that will enable MEPIS to offer its customers a dependable release schedule. Woodford states “The switch to the Ubuntu pools was made to provide our users with a more stable underlying system. Of course it’s important for our users that MEPIS remains true to its unique vision. I believe this release demonstrates that we can combine the magic of the MEPIS user experience with the goodness of the Ubuntu foundation.”

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Ever wondered what it takes to host an Ubuntu mirror? Well, here’s an update from our Swedish friends at UMU’s Academic Computer Club. They operate one of our biggest mirrors, and have the numbers and pretty graphs to show for it:

The 42TB total network traffic over the week around the Breezy release shown in this last graph is equivalent to about 70 thousand cd-images. We estimate that about 10-15 thousand cd-images were downloaded during the first day and about 100 thousand cd-images (60TB) during the week following the release.

Thanks to Mattias and his team for pushing their network to the limit in the name of Free Software!

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Tom’s Hardware takes a look at the Ubuntu H2 Micro USB Drive. This small thumbdrive is a self contained unit that plugs into any USB port and boots into Ubuntu 4.10. Setting up the H2 is simple:

We picked an ordinary computer system in our office, plugged the H2 device into an empty USB 2.0 port, and inserted the mini DVD into the drive to boot from it. After starting the Ubuntu installation procedure, you merely have to confirm some questions about three times, and the whole process was done in six minutes.

After that the drive can be used on any PC that supports booting from USB media. It features 3 gigabytes of storage space and retails for about ~US$135.

Sivan Green reports that IBM has certified their popular DB2 Universal Database for use on Ubuntu. Sivan reported on working with the IBM team in Toronto, Canada.

It’s really great that IBM has been behind us with this certification, and shows the foresight that the DB2 team has.

Canonical has published a press release and expects to announce more certifications over the following months